Sinnamon

A Deadly Exposition

Somewhere in the Florida Everglades, eight years later...

    "So what the hell are you doing in Florida again?"

Sindra continued to walk through the damp forest, carefully avoiding marsh puddles and wet overhanging leaves. She spoke to the fellow hunter through the phone calmly and carefully, "Oh, didn't I tell you? I'm just visiting family. I'll be back... probably sometime next week." As if she would ever have any family from Florida, but the lie was perfect and it would explain why Sindra needed a week away from home.

    "Right... well I'll see you on Tuesday, I guess. Stay safe, and I hope your family's doing well."

"Thank you Koda. See you on Tuesday, I'll be sure to text or call you when I leave on that day."

    They hung up, and now Sindra was free to resume her mission.

Sindra was in Florida because she was searching for a high-risk werewolf, after an anonymous client had asked her to track it down and kill it in return for a very high sum. That was the real reason. She couldn't share this information even with her most trusted colleague, Drew Koda, so she hoped he bought the whole 'visiting family' thing. And of course she had to bring back proof for her client... and after wandering here for quite some time, she knew was getting pretty close to it.

Luckily, after the werewolf went haywire from silver poisoning and just barely managed to skim through Fort Lauderdale, it had remained here. So far Sindra had been hunting it for four hours, and was deep within the Everglades by now, ready to find it and slay it before it could mutilate someone. She was surprised it hadn't killed at all so far, but that could quickly change, so she had to be careful that she matched her speed of searching to her stealth.

After another half hour of hunting, she found gigantic paw prints that could easily be mistaken for a bear's to the untrained eye, but any seasoned hunter knew that it was werewolf tracks. Sindra knelt down to inspect the paw print, noticing tiny blood spatters within that glistened in the late afternoon sunlight. So that meant that these tracks were fresh... she had to be right on top of it now.

Sindra carefully unlatched her handgun from her belt, making sure that it was loaded to the brim with silver bullets. Surely enough it was, so she continued onward to follow the fresh tracks, which eventually led to a marsh and grew harder to follow. Sindra scanned the landscape around her and ahead of her, trying to locate at least a flicker of movement from the moss-covered trees. But there was absolutely nothing. The marsh forest seemed to be holding its breath, all of the birds having fallen silent and the frogs and toads no longer croaking. Her suspicions mounted as she heard an animalistic groaning that seemed to be coming from all around her, but that was impossible.

Suddenly, the groaning stopped, and the eerie silence returned. The hairs along Sindra's arms began to raise, a natural reaction even from a hunter. She narrowed her eyes, slowly raising her handgun, until a shadow loomed behind her and something heavy slammed into the side of her head. She fell right into the marshy waters, now soaked and covered in moss and lichen. Sindra scowled as she stared up at her assailant and quickly assessed it before attacking. It was the werewolf, and clearly it, or he, was the one to have found her. He was also only half transformed; he had appeared to have hit her with his gigantic left paw, those knife-like claws glinting in the sunlight through the trees. His face was half wolf and half human, most of his clothes still remained, and she also noticed his hind legs and one front limb with the paw still upraised. His left arm was still completely human, but had some patches of fur sprouting from it.

He began to speak, and his voice was so distorted and garbled, sounding more like a series of growling words rather than communicating a functional human language. But by some miracle, Sindra could still understand him. "You here... to kill me? How pathetic... it will be fun to kill you first, though."